Search Matters 2014

The 2014 conference took place in April, when about 40 EPO examiners from a wide range of technical fields described their search strategies and techniques at 26 workshops held over two days. Altogether, Search Matters 2014 comprised 26 workshops and 7 plenary lectures. This e-learning module includes all the plenary lectures and workshops, some of which were recorded and can be watched in their entirety.

Biological Toolkit

Species and keyword Search

Search for patent documents that declare at least one sequence in their sequence listings section as derived from a specific species combined with a keyword full text search within the corpus of more than 320,000 biological patents.

PatSeq Finder

Compare and analyze your sequence of interest with our Patent Sequence (PatSeq) database that consists of about 150 million sequence listing entries extracted from granted or published patent documents across 15 jurisdictions. PatSeq Finder results page allows viewing of integrated patent and sequence information and alignment of related segments of sequence listing entries based on BLAST tool version 2.2.28. Here, you can filter, select, and compare related sequence segments, review their alignment details, and even share results in various formats with others or link to the patent document information available in the Lens.

PatSeq Explorer

Navigate sequence listing entries from granted and published patent documents as mapped with various similarity and coverage thresholds onto a specific genome and in this case, the human genome. View the mapped PatSeq data at the genome or chromosome level, filter by sequence-based criteria or search by patent attributes and zoom in to analyze patent and sequence data at the locus or sequence detailed level using another tool, PatSeq Analyzer. The analyzer allows you to navigate and compare the current patenting activity surrounding a particular chromosomal region. Additional links to the OMIM database is available at the Chromosome level so that you can view associated diseases and traits with a particular chromosomal locus.

Upon graduating from high school, Carlson worked his way through a nearby junior college where he majored in chemistry. He then entered California Institute of Technology, and was graduated in two years with a degree in physics.

More problems faced Carlson as he entered a job market shattered by the developing Depression. He applied to eighty-two firms, and received only two replies before landing a $35-a-week job as a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City. As the Depression deepened, he was laid off at Bell, worked briefly for a patent attorney, and then secured a position with the electronics firm of PR. Mallory & Co. While there, he studied law at night, earning a law degree from New York Law School. Carlson was eventually promoted to manager of Mallory’s patent department.

“I had my job,” he recalled, “but I didn’t think I was getting ahead very fast. I was just living from hand to mouth, and I had just gotten married. It was kind of a struggle, so I thought the possibility of making an invention might kill two birds with one stone: It would be a chance to do the world some good and also a chance to do myself some good.”

As he worked at his job, Carlson noted that there never seemed to be enough carbon copies of patent specifications, and there seemed to be no quick or practical way of getting more. The choices were limited to sending for expensive photo copies, or having the documents retyped and then reread for errors.

A thought occurred to him: Offices might benefit from a device that would accept a document and make copies of it in seconds. For many monthsCarlson spent his evenings at the New York Public Library reading all he could about imaging processes. He decided immediately not to research in the area of conventional photography, where light is an agent for chemical change, because that phenomenon was already being exhaustively explored in research labs of large corporations.